


homecoming

by purlieu



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, character introspection, lots of purple prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:06:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22058254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purlieu/pseuds/purlieu
Summary: Six blew Ulysses apart as much as he blew apart the Divide. Puts him back together, too.
Relationships: Male Courier/Ulysses
Comments: 8
Kudos: 46





	homecoming

**Author's Note:**

> hi subscribers sorry i'm posting cringe. fallout just remains near and dear to my heart

When the cool night has taken the scorched surface of the Divide, Ulysses watches. 

It's a shared duty, keeping a lookout at night on the trek back to the Mojave. Ulysses takes the hours after dusk, and Six the hours before dawn.

So the sun sets, and he watches. 

He watches the ever-present storms roll through the sky. He watches Marked Men bustle in the distance. 

He watches Six breathe, slow and deep and even.

Ulysses' emotions flow through him slowly, carefully, and drip out of his mouth as a kind of poetry. He's been taken far too many times by the fiery hand of impulse, and now he ducks it, and breathes, and thinks. 

He’s not sure how he ended up here. He remembers Six talking to him at the bunker, speaking to him of his own history, fighting the Marked Men together, two bodies as one. He remembers Six mourning an Eyebot, leaving, looking surprised when Ulysses followed.

There was nothing left in that bunker for him. So Ulysses followed the Courier, as he always had, as it was meant to be.

But the trek across the Divide to the Mojave, Six’s home, was a long one. They took it together, the two Couriers. 

Ulysses followed, because Six was a leader. He knows it, and he knows Six knows it. Courier Six is destined to change the Mojave, for better or worse. Wherever he goes, he stirs up change in his wake, like dust storms follow on his heels. 

Six is a leader, but one he’s willing to follow. 

Ulysses is cautious. He’s followed too many leaders in his life, false prophets spilling stories of glory and power. 

Six may be a leader, but he carries little glory. There is no crown upon his head, no robes on his form, just dirt smeared on his nose and worn combat armor holding his body together. 

Six could be any wastelander. There’s a certain humility in that, in being a part of the people you serve. 

He treats Ulysses like just another wastelander as well. Ulysses is sure Six knows his power, watches him with careful eyes, but below those eyes is a carefree smile, a mouth spilling friendly banter, like they’ve known each other for years. Perhaps they have, though not as friends. 

Six doesn’t seem to mind.

He passes the time with the tinny radio signal he can get through his Pip-Boy, at first, but soon enough that grows old and he talks.

“So... I really don’t know much about you, you know.”

Ulysses thinks of holotapes clutched in Six’s hands. Thinks otherwise. “You know my history. You know enough.”

Six snorts. “No, no, nothin’ like that. Like... dumb shit. Like, do you think nightstalkers would make good pets, or do you like the taste of agave - everyone seems to either love it or hate it, it’s so weird. I hate it, by the way.”

His conversation is rapid-fire, friendly. Seeking out personal traits, but not invasively so. He skims the surface of Ulysses’ conscious, like taking the cream off of the top of brahmin milk, and ignores what churns below. 

Perhaps, at some point, Ulysses might have wished for that. The ability to be defined by everything but your past - to build a self around trivial things, instead of deep, plunging scars. It was something he almost achieved, back in Wolfhorn: a life needing to go no deeper than the surface. 

But as always, things looped back to the past. Back to Six. All roads lead to Rome, the paths you tread seem always to walk right back into history.

Six is staring at him expectantly. He hums noncommittally. “Nightstalkers are a pain. Kill livestock. Agave is just fine.”

“Livestock? Ohh,” Six coos at the admission. “Oh, you’re one of those rancher types.”

Ulysses presses his lips together. “I suppose. Had a ranch for a while.”

“Does brahmin meat taste less like slightly hydrated leather when it’s fresh?”

“It’s alright. Bloody, though. The tendons get in the way.”

Six makes a disgusted face, sticks his tongue out dramatically. “Gross. Brahmin always freaked me out. They’re so... knobbly.”

“They’re just animals. Seen far worse in the wasteland.”

“Well, like everything else here, I always feel like they’re gonna jump me. Impale me with their... creepy little brahmin horns. Blech.”

“To each their own.” 

“Aw, is that your way of saying you actually like them? I figure you have ta, if you ran a ranch. That’s so cute, oh, you’re the type a’ guy who likes animals better than people, aren’t ya?”

Ulysses tries not to feel like Six is reading him. It’s a strange feeling - not many people are able to do so. They called him stoic, stonefaced, like a statue. Carved out of marble, all intense eyes and broad shoulders and scowls. He makes a noise. “Animals talk less.”

Six throws his hands up. “Gotcha, gotcha, I’ll shut up. Just figured ya might want some entertainment, but who am I to say no to a party pooper.”

Ulysses thinks it’s the other way around, and Six was the one who wanted entertainment, but he stays quiet. Six does the same until twenty minutes later, when he remarks on the architecture of one of the Old World buildings, and doesn’t stop from there. They shelter later in the same building, when a particularly violent storm threatens ahead. The day’s not done yet, and it’s a shame to waste daylight, but it’s better to be slow than dead.

Six kicks some debris out of the way to roll out his bedroll, evidently finding the idea of sleeping through the storm more appealing than trying to entertain himself. He always insists on sleeping with his back to the wall, and Ulysses doesn't question. He knows well the feeling of being surrounded by danger, of keeping a constant eye on your back.

So he keeps watch, while Six sags into the vulnerability of sleep. Watches as his face relaxes into something more placid, less practiced than his easy, dangerous smile. The knife’s edge of friendliness he plays on, hiding the silenced pistol in his pocket. He’s more sly than he looks. 

It’s strange seeing a man like him so vulnerable. That Courier Six, Hero of the Mojave, could be ended just like this, with an easy knife to the gut or a bullet to the head. That’s what he did to Benny, he told Ulysses with a chuckle at some point. “Exhausted” him (he put air quotes around this, strangely chaste about the act) then blew his brains out while he slept. An unsavory sort of revenge, but it did its job.

Ulysses wonders, absently, who else has seen Six in this vulnerability of sleep. He’s been told Six has some regular companions he travels with, and others he takes to bed with him, but it’s doubtful Six reveals himself like this to many others.

He tries not to feel too special about it, like he’s witnessing something rare, a great beast at rest. Six is only a man: but still, a man who caused the reckoning of the Divide and who has stared some of the Legion’s best assassins in the face and laughed. There’s something to be said for that power.

It makes strange things stir in him, things he had thought long fallen into hibernation, seeing Six’s strong face slack in sleep. He looks away, keeps up the illusion of keeping watch even if no one’s around to call him on it. He thinks cyclical thoughts, makes lists in his head, like he used to back during the waiting, the endless waiting for Six, after he’d finished every book he could find and hunted as much as his body could take. The Divide is a place parched of many things, entertainment one of them. Perhaps that’s why Six talks so much.

The storm passes within a few hours or so, Ulysses judges by the angle of light on the floor, as the actual location of the Sun can’t ever be placed through the thick clouds that hang over the Divide.

He shakes Six awake, watches as he grumbles and groans for a bit before fully awakening and glancing outside to check the weather for himself. Seemingly finding it satisfactory, he starts packing up his bedroll. They set out within minutes: never time to waste here.

Once they’re back on the road, Six starts talking again, as he does.

“You believe in God?” Six asks.

His eyes are carefully averted, focused on the rock he’s tossing up and catching as they walk. Stride casual, confident. He could as well be asking about the weather.

Ulysses doesn’t believe in a higher power, no. Perhaps he did, once, back when the Twisted Hairs were his home, before him and his people were swallowed up by the great unrelenting beast that was the Bull. Such things tend to take away a man’s faith.

Caesar was the kind of man who would challenge a god, anyways. Would stare into the eyes of a higher power and tell them he was better, because the Bull didn’t back down, and the Bull didn’t submit. Perhaps he’d be smited for it. Perhaps he would kill the god. Kill the light.

“No.” Ulysses says.

Six hums. “Hmm. Hmm. Makes sense, honestly. I can get the want to hope thing, but like, I think there’s a point where God stops challengin’ you and just outright is trying to kill you. So either God hates us or they don’t exist. I don’t really care either way. Add it to the stack of things tryna kill me.”

“If I was to believe, it would be in a cruel god. One we made bitter through our own actions. Our endless wars. Our endless destruction.” He casts a meaningful look at Six.

“Hey, I only blew up a few of those warheads, ok? There were some areas I needed to get through and I’m not a very good climber, ‘specially not with Marked Men snapping at my heels.” 

“Not my point.”

Six sighs. “Yeah. Maybe all this is just punishment for being pieces of shit to each other all the time. I can believe in some kind of karma, at least. What you put out into the world comes back around.”

“If what went around came around, Caesar would be long dead.” _Seize-r,_ he says it, resisting the old Bull pronunciation that tickles at the tip of his tongue.

“Ha!” Six throws his head back and lets out one loud, dry bark of laughter. “Hey, sometimes you wanna believe there’s some justice in this world, I guess.”

“To believe, yes. Sometimes all we can do.”

Six snorts. “Believing’s all well and good, but I think it’s a lot more about action. You could pray every single day for a silent god to strike Caesar down, but unless you march through that shitty little camp of his and put a bullet through his head yourself, nothin’s gonna happen to him. No one in this goddamn desert ever does anything. Guess that’s why they think I’m such a revolutionary. But nah, I’m just a guy who does things. ‘Some courier walk-the-wasteland-fuck.’, as they say.”

Ulysses studies him with a new interest. Six isn’t exactly selling himself short with the titles, he finds. At his core, he’s just someone who actually goes out and gets things done, unlike the Bear, that sits on its heels and cries fat tears as the Bull invades its lands. Ulysses wonders, for a moment, what it meant when he sat alone in waiting for Six. Perhaps he could have instead gone out and taken action- but no, the Marked Men are far beyond repair, and what can one do to stop the heavens from storming? He’s driven, but he’s no fool.

The conversation peters out there, and they walk in silence for a while before Ulysses hears it: a skittering beneath the earth, a place where his foot strikes hollow ground. He stops, catches his fingers on the edge of Six’s jacket. Six stops too, looks puzzled, but Ulysses motions towards the ground, just in time for a tunneler to burst out, screeching. Two more follow, and they both fall quickly into the sway of combat, a second form of nature to all residents of the wasteland. 

Combat is different when it’s not just him. It has its pros and cons - there’s one more person watching your back. But there’s also one more back for you to watch. 

Six isn’t very good at watching his back, it turns out. Ulysses is. This means that when a particularly spry tunneler gets the drop on Six, its claws embed themselves in Ulysses’ side instead of Six’s.

“Shit!” Six yelps, as Ulysses takes a heavy step backwards at the shock, thumping into Six’s back. It’s not hard to finish off the rest of the tunnelers from there - they’re not incompetent - but there is more blood soaking through Ulysses’ shirt than he’d like.

Six doesn’t like it either, not at all. His face twists up something fierce when he gets a look at it. “It’s fine.” Ulysses says. “I’ve felt worse.”

Six scowls. “Yeah, that’s great, but blood loss still will kill ya no matter your pain tolerance. Lean on me. We’re making camp so we can deal with _that_.”

Ulysses does not need to lean on Six. He wasn’t lying when he said he’s had worse. He’s crawled in the dirt with broken bones and aches in places he didn’t know there could be aches. Had his fair share of close calls. He’ll be fine.

He still lets Six sling his arm over his shoulders. Wonders when he got so used to following like this.

They find a burned out building quickly. It’s not much, but there’s shelter from the wind and walls at their backs, and often that’s the best you’ll get out here.

Ulysses sits down heavily when they get inside, repressing a grunt as pain shoots up his side. Six still has that twisted look on his face, like he’s smelled something awful. He kneels beside Ulysses, starts digging in his pack.

Ulysses cranes his head around to get a better view of their makeshift camp - looks for crevices a tunneler could creep through, places where the walls could crumble with just enough force. His body still hums lightly with adrenaline.

“Fucking sit _still_.” Six hisses, sounding angrier than Ulysses has heard him.

No- not angry. Concerned.

How long has it been since someone was concerned for him?

Years, it must have been. 

He grits his teeth as Six dabs at the wound, strokes quick but experienced. Wonders, faintly, where he got such experience. Images of Six alone, cleaning his own wounds from Marked Men, enter his mind unbidden. Perhaps the pain is clouding his mind. 

“Hold this here.” Six says, presses a bit of his shirt he’s torn off to the wound. Ulysses dutifully holds it, pushes it hard into the skin to help stem the bleeding. He knows the drill. 

Though, it is strange to have a second pair of hands to help with bandaging. Fingers brushing along his sides, leaving a ghostlike trail of warmth where they touched. 

Six ties off the bandage with strong, mechanical movements. It’s just the right level of tight: he knows the experience well, it’s clear. 

Six rummages in his bag, pulls out a bottle of whiskey. “Here’s your painkiller.” He says, voice tinged with a laugh. “Maybe it’ll get you to get some damn rest too.”

He sits on the edge of the bed, holds out the bottle to Ulysses, like a peace offering. 

It’s been a while since Ulysses has indulged in alcohol, but his wound aches and there’s a deep and heavy exhaustion in his bones, so he accepts it. They pass it back and forth, Six smiling around its neck, those lips, ragged from how he bites them, wrapping around it as his throat bobs with the effort of swallowing. 

Perhaps it’s the blood loss, perhaps it’s the alcohol, but Ulysses lets his gaze linger. Six finishes off the bottle, smacks his lips. Their eyes meet. 

“And just what are you looking at?” Six grins, lazy and crooked.

“Nothing.” Ulysses says. Curls in on himself a little bit, protective of something. He doesn’t know himself what.

“Hm? I think it was something.” Six says. He’s leaning closer, playing up his drunkenness like he could just as easily be listing to the side in his intoxication. 

Ulysses says nothing, just watches him. Perhaps he is a little drunk, looking at the way his eyelids are drooping.

Six leans forwards. Ulysses feels himself lean back.

Six scowls. “C’mon. What’s the deal?”

“No deal.” Ulysses mumbles.

This only seems to aggravate Six further. “Listen, when ya catch someone starin’ at your lips like that there’s around three reasons they would possibly be doin’ that. And I was pretty sure we were past the point of knockin’ my teeth out. So whaddya want?”

What does he want? Ulysses isn’t sure if he knows how to want anymore. All the want drained out of him with his anger when Six coaxed him out of fighting. He feels like a shell, now, an item with its purpose long served. Perhaps this is the effect of letting Six take so much of his life. Do his followers feel the same way?

Ulysses presses his lips together, watches Six in lieu of a proper response, his usual tapestry of illustrious words coming undone to fall at Six’s feet. Himself, coming undone to fall at Six’s feet. A thousand threads being pulled every which way, twisted like the Twisted Hairs shaped him, the White Legs mimicked him, the Bull tore him apart. Torn apart like the Divide. 

Yet Six sits here at his side, putting him back together. Making something new. He felt fire in his heart at the mention of Six long ago: now he feels it crawl up the base of his spine, travel up his back to push him forward. 

Six doesn’t seem to notice this. He huffs. “What’s up with you? Starin’ at me like that. You really plannin’ to knock my teeth out again?”

“No.” Says Ulysses, simply, follows Six’s advice and lets himself fall to action instead of empty words.

He stutters close, unable to be vulnerable yet knowing his lack of experience. The Bull was strict about these things: of course, some men got away with it, but just as many ended up crucified for laying their hands on another man. The whims of the punishers changed on a cap’s edge: it was best not to entertain such thoughts at all.

But he was out from under the shadow of the Bull. For good, he hoped. Hope just as foreign a concept to him as intimacy, but both things something he’s beginning to think he wants to feel.

Six gets the hint. He curls a hand around his jawline, rough and warm, pulls his face close. "I've thought about doing this since I first saw you," He confesses. “The attraction was more outweighed by my life being in danger at that point, though."

"Not very romantic."

Six barks a laugh, spilling the scent of dry whiskey on his breath. "If anyone ever tells you I'm a romantic they're a damn liar."

The kiss is still romantic, almost, though both of their lips are cuttingly dry and Ulysses can’t say he’s ever wrapped himself around the feeling of romance. Six holds his face tightly, like he’s worried he’ll run away. Yet when they break apart, Six is grinning.

“Actually, fuck romance. Let’s worry later for once, I just wanna get my hands on you now that I got you in ‘em.”

The fire in his spine pulses throughout his body at that, collects where Six puts his hands on him, and Ulysses is reborn in fire.

***

Ulysses refuses to rest more than a night and a day before they move again: sees it in Six too, as much as he tries not to show it. His feet itch to tread the wasteland. Perhaps he gave a shred of that longing to Ulysses too, as he feels the cliffs call to him like sirens of old, louder than he’s ever heard. 

Still they walk.

 _It’s not far now,_ Six assures, like Ulysses doesn’t know the Divide as he knows himself. 

Though perhaps he doesn’t know himself as well as he thought, he thinks, as Six’s hands on him soothe aches he didn’t know were there. A body made of bruises. 

He knows the entrance to the Divide better than any other: the graffiti there is his, after all. The scrawlings of a man desperate to find himself in another. To find home. 

Six looks at him carefully when they reach the entrance, all corrugated metal and the cliff yawning empty behind them.

“You can go home, Ulysses.” How the present mirrors the past, the words written on the walls. 

“I don’t have a home.” He says, gaze cast to the ground. Wretched.

“We’ll build one.” Six says, steady and certain.

When did it become _we_? When did he stop following Courier Six, and start walking alongside him? 

Suppose it doesn’t matter in the end. When did he stop being one of the Twisted Hairs, become a part of the great disgusting beast that was the Bull? It never stopped. It stopped as soon as his hair was cut. It will never stop.

He takes Six’s hand when it is offered. Walks with him. The two couriers, together, like it was always meant to be. 


End file.
